November 13, 2007 Archives

Writing in 1949, German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." For a generation after the war, artistic representations of any sort were almost taboo, since all media distort and exaggerate and simplify and constrain their subject matter.

I should point out that Adorno later changed his mind, but the taboo persists -- some Holocaust experts have never done more than glance at Maus because the medium does not appeal to them, and the U.S. Holocaust museum publishes a document that contains a warning against the use of simulations and games in the teaching of the Holocaust. Adorno was making a comment about how recent events changed the medium of poetry, and the museum presented its "no games or simulations" warning in order to prevent teachers from dividing kids up into guards and prisoners, both statements have been applied to warn artists away from using a particular artistic medium to represent a human experience, referred to in Hebrew as Shoah ("disaster; upheaval").

This article quotes Spiegelman as saying, "As they say, there's no business like Shoah business."

The predicament facing newspaper book reviews is best understood
against the backdrop of several overlapping and contending crises: the
first is the general challenge confronting America's newspapers of
adapting to the new digital and electronic technologies that are
increasingly absorbing advertising dollars, wooing readers away from
newspapers, and undercutting profit margins; the second is the profound
structural transformation roiling the entire book-publishing and
book-selling industry in an age of conglomeration and digitization; and
the third and most troubling crisis is the sea change in the culture of
literacy itself, the degree to which our overwhelmingly fast and
visually furious culture renders serious reading increasingly
irrelevant, hollowing out the habits of attention indispensable for
absorbing long-form narrative and the following of sustained argument.

These crises, taken together, have profound implications, not least
for the effort to create an informed citizenry so necessary for a
thriving democracy. It would be hard to overestimate the importance in
these matters of how books are reported upon and discussed. The moral
and cultural imperative is plain, but there may also be a
much-overlooked commercial opportunity for newspapers waiting to be
seized.